Andrew Cuomo’s Got to Go
Despite his serial sexual harassment, far more egregious were his policies killing thousands of elderly New Yorkers.
Now that even our nation’s lying, hair-sniffing, sexually harassing president is calling for Andrew Cuomo’s resignation, we wonder: What’s this guy waiting for, the Pope?
“I think he should resign,” said Joe Biden, finally, at a White House news conference yesterday.
By now, even the hardiest, most resolute of rats has abandoned The Bad Ship Cuomo, and the New York governor is all but alone in thinking he should keep his job. (When you’re the Democrat governor of a northeastern state, and you’ve lost your neighboring fellow Democrat governors, your time is pretty much up.)
Perhaps a tiny fraction of Cuomo’s detractors still hope he’ll stick it out (so to speak) like fellow New York pol Anthony Weiner, just because they love good theater. But that’s a poor excuse for him to continue to occupy the governor’s mansion, and to continue to afflict and embarrass the citizens of the Empire State.
The things Governor Cuomo is accused of are serious stuff, and they’re a bed of his own making, given the abundance of highly credible allegations against him, and given his professed support for female victims of precisely the sort of behavior he’s accused of. Remember: This is the same sleazebag who once tweeted, “There should be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual harassment & must send a clear message that this behavior is not tolerated.”
We wonder: What part of “zero tolerance” doesn’t this guy understand?
New York Attorney General Letitia James (herself a fellow Democrat, and reportedly a gubernatorial aspirant) issued a 165-page report on Tuesday, and its contents are plenty damning — “devastating,” in the words of former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy. The executive summary reads:
We, the investigators appointed to conduct an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, conclude that the Governor engaged in conduct constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York State law. Specifically, we find that the Governor sexually harassed a number of current and former New York State employees by, among other things, engaging in unwelcome and nonconsensual touching, as well as making numerous offensive comments of a suggestive and sexual nature that created a hostile work environment for women. Our investigation revealed that the Governor’s sexually harassing behavior was not limited to members of his own staff, but extended to other State employees, including a State Trooper on his protective detail and members of the public. We also conclude that the Executive Chamber’s culture — one filled with fear and intimidation, while at the same time normalizing the Governor’s frequent flirtations and gender-based comments — contributed to the conditions that allowed the sexual harassment to occur and persist. That culture also influenced the improper and inadequate ways in which the Executive Chamber has responded to allegations of harassment.
Among the newly released allegations are those of a New York State Trooper whom Cuomo allegedly harassed. As The Daily Signal reports: “Cuomo sexually harassed the female New York state trooper ‘on a number of occasions,’ the report said, including by ‘running his hand across her stomach, from her belly button to her right hip, while she held a door open for him at an event,’ by ‘running his finger down her back, from the top of her neck down her spine to the middle of her back, saying "hey, you,” while she was standing in front of him in an elevator,’ and by ‘kissing her (and only her) on the cheek in front of another Trooper and asking to kiss her on another occasion, which she deflected.’“
We should also note that Cuomo’s signature on a document attesting to his having taken the state’s mandatory sexual harassment training course was fabricated by an underling.
This should not just be about sexual harassment, though. It should be about death and dying. And Democrats local, statewide, and national have been conspicuously and disgracefully silent about it.
We’ve been over this ground before, but Cuomo’s actions as governor resulted in the deaths of thousands of New York’s senior citizens. The facts are stubborn, and they make clear that Cuomo shoved his state’s coronavirus-positive elderly folks back into nursing homes, where COVID-19 could spread unchecked among its most vulnerable population. And if we’re to believe his top aide, Cuomo then tried to cover up the true death toll — all while cashing in on his book about leadership during a crisis.
Andrew Cuomo is among the most contemptible of politicians — an arrogant, entitled, narcissistic bully. His videotaped message about the harassment investigation does little to change this. Recall that this is the same Emmy Award-winning governor who’d been yukking it up on CNN with his brother Chris all throughout the pandemic, and doing tone-deaf victory laps, and showing off his cartoonish mountain-of-death poster, and promoting his so-called leadership book. What a guy.
Fox Business anchor Dagen McDowell was perhaps prescient many months ago when she said: "Monster, sociopath, human emetic, take your pick. My guess is that his political career is over. Maybe his bro can get him a job on TV.”
Let’s hope that, for the sake of decency, McDowell proves right — except for the “TV” part. We’ve already had our fill of Andrew Cuomo.